What exactly does 'money laundering' mean? And I don't think it means getting soap and water and washing money.

Bill Gates

It means converting money gained by illegal acts such as drug trafficking and putting it into something that will show that the sum of money has been achieved legally. Feb 09 02, 3:53 AM

Barrow boy

Just to expand on that, let's take a very simple and artificial example. Suppose you had made loads of money from illegal operations, but it was held in cash and you knew that the governmental authorities were on the lookout for individual people paying large amounts of cash into their bank account. So instead, you buy a burger bar and drip feed your cash into the business as if it came from customers. Now you've got respectable money in the bank, and nobody can prove where it came from. In practice money laundering is a lot more complex than this, but hopefully you can see where I'm coming from. Feb 09 02, 8:58 AM

Stevo

One of the original legitimate businesses used was laundries, which explains why the word laundering became common. Feb 15 02, 10:34 AM

willo'wisp

Money laundering is the practice of engaging in financial transactions in order to conceal the identity, source, and/or destination of money, and is a main operation of the underground economy. In the past, the term "money laundering" was applied only to financial transactions related to organized crime. Today its definition is often expanded by government regulators (such as the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) to encompass any financial transaction which generates an asset or a value as the result of an illegal act, which may involve actions such as tax evasion or false accounting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering Jan 22 08, 10:39 PM

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